1.3 ethnic minority Flashcards
Gilbourn - linguistic skills
Gilbourn notes Indian pupils do well despite often not having English as their home language.
Pryce and Lawrence - cultural deprivation theory
Pryce argues the impact of colonization has left black pupils with low self esteem and less resistant to racism whereas Asians have a greater sense of self worth and more resistant to racism.
Lawrence challenges Pryce’s view that black pupils fail due to weak culture he says it’s because of racism.
Scruton
Scruton sees low levels of achievement resulting from a failure to embrace mainstream British culture.
Keddie - Criticisms of cultural deprivation theory
Keddie sees it as victim blaming, the ethnic minority are culturally different not deprived, they underachieve because schools are ethnocentric - biased of white
culture
material deprivation and class - Chinese pupils
86% of Chinese girls who received fsm achieved 5+ higher GCSE grades compared with 65% of white girls not receiving fsm
Racism in wider society
In employment:
Wood carried out a study where he sent 3 closely matched job applications using names associated with different ethnic groups to 1000 job vacancies.
He found 1 in 6 ethnic minority offered job interview compared to 1 in 9 white applicants
This explains why ethic minority are more likely to face unemployment and low pay , having a negative impact on children’s prospects.
Black pupils and discipline - Gilbourn and Youdell
Gilbourn and Youdell found teachers were quicker to discipline black pupils that others for the same behaviour as a result of racialised expectations
- teachers expected to have more problems with black pupils and misinterpreted their behaviour as threatening or challenging authority.
If teachers acted on the misperception ,pupils responded negatively and further conflict resulted. This explains the high level of exclusions - only ⅕ excluded pupils achieve 5 GCSEs.
Asian pupils - Wright
Wright found that teachers took for granted that British culture and standard English is superior.
Teachers assumed Asian pupils have poorer grasp of English and left them out of class discussions or used simplistic, childish language when speaking to them.
Asian pupils felt isolated when teachers mispronounced their names - girls were marginalised and prevented from participating.
Chinese pupils - Archer and Francis
Chinese pupils seen as achieving the wrong way - through hard work and passive conformism rather than natural ability meaning they could never legitimately occupy identity of ideal pupil
Archer and Francis sum up teachers view of them as negative positive stereotype
Marketisation and segregation - Gilbourn
Gilbourn argues marketisation gives schools more scope to select pupils it allows negative stereotypes to influence decisions about school admissions
This selection leads to an ethnically stratified education system
Ethnocentric curriculum - David Gibourn and Coard
Policy/attitude that gives priority to one particular ethnic group
It builds a racial bias into the everyday working of schools and colleges
Eg: languages - David describes the national curriculum as a specifically British curriculum that largely ignores non-European languages
Coard - ethnocentric curriculum may produce underachievement as they feel excluded and unmotivated when learning british history and only colonisation of black people which lowers their self esteem
Assessment - Gilbourn
Gilbourn argues the assessment game is rigged to validate the dominant cultures superiority
If black children succeed as a group the rules will be changed to re engineer failure
eg: in 2000 in one local authority black children were the highest achievers on entry to school/baseline test (20% above average) but by 2003 the new foundation stage profile ranked black children lower than whites across all 6 development areas it measured.
Criticism of Gillbourn - Swell
Swell argues racism is not powerful enough to prevent individuals from succeeding and we need to focus on external factors such as boys anti school subcultures
Critics argue how can there be institutional racism if two groups can do so well
- this view justifies the failure of other minorities like blacks failing as they are unwilling and ignores model minorities still suffer from racism
eg: Chinese pupils report similar levels of harassment as black Caribbeans
The new IQism - Gilbourn
In what Gilbourn calls the new IQism he argues teachers and policymakers make false assumptions about the nature of pupils’ ability or potential.
He argues there is no genuine measure of potential and all a test can do is tell us what a person has already learnt or can do now, not what they may be able to do in the future.
Access to opportunities such as higher sets or the gifted and talented programme depend heavily on teachers’ assessments of pupils’ ability.
Teachers place students in sets not only on the basis of prior attainment but also on disciplinary concerns and the perception of their attitude.
Gilbourn and youdell found teachers had racialised expectations that black pupils would pose more discipline problems.
Access to opportunities
The gifted and talented programme was created with the aim of meeting the needs of more able pupils.
While this seems to benefit bright pupils from ethnic minority, Gilbourn points out official statistics show whites are over twice as likely as black Caribbeans to be identified as gifted and talented.
